Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Movie review: Some long overdue notes on Star Trek

Some first impressions as the closing credits are running on my DVD player.

I like the red shirt guy when they sky dived and his parachute sucked him into the big fiery drill thing. He was even wearing red. It was a funny joke, the characters and audience all knew he wouldn’t last long.

Isn’t Winona Ryder (Spock’s mom) younger than the guy who played Spock?

Why did she jump into the dying planet?.....her son and husband were with her, it’s not like she was abandoning them on the planet.

I liked the Kobayashi Maru scene, especially compared to how they did it in Wrath of Khan. Uhura says the same opening line, but this time totally bored.

Putting the scorpion thing in Pike was too much stolen from Khan.

umm..why did the interior of the Romulan ship look like an exploding volcano? Even when it *wasn’t* in battle.

Is Eric Bana awful in *everything?* I only saw him in The Hulk where he was equally uninteresting.

Time paradoxes always make my head spin, the whole explanation of the plot made no sense to me. I have to watch it again now.

When the giant drill thing was attacking earth, weren’t there other ships there to cut the line holding the drill?

And the giant drill thing hanging from a spaceship was kind of silly.

Why would Spock maroon Kirk on a planet with man-eating dinosaurs?

The ending: Ummm..if you shoot a black hole at an enemy ship, it’s best to take off right away and not hang around to see how it works out and risk getting sucked in.

I liked the whole starting over the whole timeline thing. I like to think this means Star Trek: Next Generation will never have happened.

Old Trekkies know Capt. Pike wasn’t confined to a wheelchair til much later. And Kirk didn’t even hear about it until months after it happened.

I never thought I’d say this but: Too much Leonard Nimoy!

There was a scene in the original series where Kirk had to piss off Spock to get him to beat him up, so that was borrowed, also.

Lots of dialogue allusions to ST II, III and VI, so that was cool

Also, an allusion to ST: TMP, where the operator of the transporter sat behind protective glass to protect him from the radiation. They forgot about this for all the movies until this one.

Good use of rest of crew (sulu, scotty, chekov, especially Scotty and Uhura), most films, heck most episodes had no idea what to do with these extra characters).

What was Tyler Perry doing there?

In conclusion, despite all the petty gripes, I did enjoy it, especially the first half. It just got sillier as it went on and the climax was more confusing than exciting. I really don’t mind the changes from canon, after 40 years of clutter it could use a good reboot. The big problem was it started off as a “not your grandfather’s Star Trek,” but still relied on kitschy plot tropes. (earth in danger, Enterprise is nearest ship, phaser gets knocked away in two different fight scenes, transporter, communications become dysfunctional when convenient for plot.)